Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

I waited all the weeks ahead for Richard to make the first suggestion that we should move away. I was afraid to suggest it first lest he should resent the move all his life. Our long leave was not due for another year. Our annual leave was not due for some months. At last he said, ‘I can’t stand it here.’

I wanted to return to England. I had been thinking of nothing else. ‘We can’t stay here,’ I said, as if it were a part in a play. ‘Shall we pack up and go?’ he said, and I felt a huge relief. ‘No,’ I said.

He said, ‘It would be a pity to pack it all in when we’ve both gone so far in tropical diseases.

In fact I left the following week. Since then, Richard has gone far in tropical diseases. ‘It’s a pity,’ he said before I left, ‘to let what’s happened come between us.’

I packed up my things and departed for dear life, before the dry season should set in, and the rainy season should follow, and all things be predictable.

Bang-Bang You’re Dead

At that time many of the men looked like Rupert Brooke, whose portrait still hung in everyone’s imagination. It was that dear-cut, ‘typically English’ face which is seldom seen on the actual soil of England but proliferates in the African Colonies.

‘I must say,’ said Sybil’s hostess, ‘the men look charming.’ These men were all charming, Sybil had decided at the time, until you got to know them. She sat in the dark room watching the eighteen-year-old film unrolling on the screen as if the particular memory had solidified under the effect of some intense heat coming out of the projector. She told herself, I was young, I demanded nothing short of perfection. But then, she thought, that is not quite the case. But it comes to the same thing; to me, the men were not charming for long.

The first reel came to an end. Someone switched on the light. Her host picked the next film out of its tropical packing.

‘It must be an interesting experience,’ said her hostess, ‘seeing yourself after all those years.

‘Hasn’t Sybil seen these films before?’ said a latecomer.

‘No, never — have you, Sybil?’

‘No, never.’

‘If they had been my films,’ said her hostess, ‘my curiosity could not have waited eighteen years.

The Kodachrome reels had lain in their boxes in the dark of Sybil’s cabin trunk. Why bother, when one’s memory was clear?

‘Sybil didn’t know anyone who had a projector,’ said her hostess, ‘until we got ours.

‘It was delightful,’ said the latecomer, an elderly lady, ‘what I saw of it. Are the others as good?’

Sybil thought for a moment. ‘The photography is probably good,’ she said. ‘There was a cook behind the camera.

‘A cook! How priceless; whatever do you mean?’ said her hostess.

‘The cook-boy,’ said Sybil, ‘was trained up to use the camera.

‘He managed it well,’ said her host, who was adjusting the new reel.

‘Wonderful colours,’ said her hostess. ‘Oh, I’m so glad you dug them out. How healthy and tanned and open-necked everyone looks. And those adorable shiny natives all over the place.’

The elderly lady said, ‘I liked the bit where you came out on the veranda in your shorts carrying the gun.’

‘Ready?’ said Sybil’s host. The new reel was fixed. ‘Put out the lights,’ he said.

It was the stoep again. Through the french windows came a dark girl in shorts followed by a frisky young Alsatian.

‘Lovely dog,’ commented Sybil’s host. ‘He seems to be asking Sybil for a game.

‘That is someone else,’ Sybil said very quickly.

‘The girl there, with the dog?’

‘Yes, of course. Don’t you see me walking across the lawn by the trees?’

‘Oh, of course, of course. She did look like you, Sybil, that girl with the dog. Wasn’t she like Sybil? I mean, just as she came out on the veranda.’

‘Yes, I thought it was Sybil for a moment until I saw Sybil in the background. But you can see the difference now. See, as she turns round. That girl isn’t really like Sybil, it must be the shorts.’

‘There was a slight resemblance between us,’ Sybil remarked. The projector purred on.

‘Look, there’s a little girl rather like you, Sybil.’ Sybil, walking between her mother and father, one hand in each, had already craned round. The other child, likewise being walked along, had looked back too.

The other child wore a black velour hat turned up all round, a fawn coat of covert-coating, and at her neck a narrow white ermine tie. She wore white silk gloves. Sybil was dressed identically, and though this in itself was nothing to marvel at, since numerous small girls wore this ensemble when they were walked out in the parks and public gardens of cathedral towns in 1923, it did fortify the striking resemblance in features, build, and height, between the two children. Sybil suddenly felt she was walking past her own reflection in the long looking-glass. There was her peak chin, her black bobbed hair under her hat, with its fringe almost touching her eyebrows. Her wide-spaced eyes, her nose very small like a cat’s. ‘Stop staring, Sybil,’ whispered her mother. Sybil had time to snatch the gleam of white socks and black patent leather button shoes. Her own socks were white but her shoes were brown, with laces. At first she felt this one discrepancy was wrong, in the sense that it was wrong to step on one of the cracks in the pavement. Then she felt it was right that there should be a difference.

‘The Colemans,’ Sybil’s mother remarked to her father. ‘They keep that hotel at Hillend. The child must be about Sybil’s age. Very alike, aren’t they? And I suppose,’ she continued for Sybil’s benefit, ‘she’s a good little girl like Sybil.’ Quick-witted Sybil thought poorly of the last remark with its subtle counsel of perfection.

On other occasions, too, they passed the Coleman child on a Sunday walk. In summer time the children wore panama hats and tussore silk frocks discreetly adorned with drawn-thread work. Sometimes the Coleman child was accompanied by a young mad-servant in grey dress and black stockings. Sybil noted this one difference between her own entourage and the other girl’s. ‘Don’t turn round and stare,’ whispered her mother.

It was not till she went to school that she found Désirée Coleman to be a year older than herself. Désirée was in a higher class but sometimes, when the whole school was assembled on the lawn or in the gym, Sybil would be, for a few moments, mistaken for Désirée. In the late warm spring the classes sat in separate groups under the plane trees until, as by simultaneous instinct, the teachers would indicate time for break. The groups would mingle, and ‘Sybil, dear, your shoe-lace,’ a teacher might call out; and then, as Sybil regarded her neat-laced shoes, ‘Oh no, not Sybil, I mean Désirée.’ In the percussion band Sybil banged her triangle triumphantly when the teacher declared, ‘Much better than yesterday, Sybil.’ But she added, ‘I mean Désirée.’

Only the grown-ups mistook one child for another at odd moments. None of her small companions made this mistake. After the school concert Sybil’s mother said, ‘For a second I thought you were Désirée in the choir. It’s strange you are so alike. I’m not a bit like Mrs Coleman and your daddy doesn’t resemble him in the least.’

Sybil found Désirée unsatisfactory as a playmate. Sybil was precocious, her brain was like a blade. She had discovered that dull children were apt to be spiteful. Désirée would sit innocently cross-legged beside you at a party, watching the conjurer, then suddenly, for no apparent reason, jab at you viciously with her elbow.

By the time Sybil was eight and Désirée nine it was seldom that anyone, even strangers and new teachers, mixed them up. Sybil’s nose became more sharp and pronounced while Désirée’s seemed to sink into her plump cheeks like a painted-on nose. Only on a few occasions, and only on dark winter afternoons between the last of three o’clock daylight and the coming on of lights all over the school, was Sybil mistaken for Désirée.